Special Issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the NetScience and the Senses (1789-1914)

According to John Locke, the senses are manâ€™s only connection to theoutside world. It is through sensual experience that man acquiresknowledge about that world. Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands theMuse (1949) first established how many philosophers and poets used thecamera obscura as a model for explaining the processes of humanunderstanding; and, she stressed that even if the body was considered thecentre of all human experience, the mind within it was perceived as atone remove from any original phenomena. This visual model forunderstanding the relationship between sensory perception and the mindhas been extended by Jonathan Crary in the highly influential Techniquesof the Observer (1990).

Romanticists and Victorianists have responded extensively to Crary'sarguments about the various technological models of vision with theresult that visual culture and the gaze (whether masculine, scientific orotherwise) are quite well studied in these periods. However, one of thecrucial arguments in Crary's work that is less well-responded to is thenewly scientific centring of the origin of visionâ€”as well as the othersensesâ€”within the human body. As the developing study of physiology cameto this conclusion in the early nineteenth century, it was not only thevisual sense, but also hearing, touch, taste and smell that became newlysubjective, unstable and temporal. This process had crucial implicationsfor the formation of subjectivity as well as the conceptualisation of thebody itself.

This special issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net willexplore two primary questions. First, how does this scientific andindustrial mechanisation of the senses influence conceptions ofsubjectivity? For example, if models of perception draw on opticaltechnologies to explain vision and sight, does the conception of what itmeans to be human change accordingly? Secondly, if sensory perception,when science locates it in the human body, becomes unstable,unpredictable and temporary, how might this formulation provide a basefor resistance to this mechanisation? If sensory perception were asunstable as physiology suggested, then the codification of the sensescould only predict and control humans and societies to a limited degree.

We hope to put the â€˜otherâ€™ senses on par with the visual and areinterested in the interplay between the senses. Articles of 5,000 to8,000 words should be sent to Sibylle Erle (sibylle.erle_at_bishopg.ac.uk)and Laurie Garrison (lgarrison_at_lincoln.ac.uk) by 15 January 2008.

Possible topics might include:

The senses, their representation and the aesthetic effects thereof in thediscourses on scientific, medical, cultural and literary thoughtAdvances and new developments in the mechanisation of the sensesOn the cusp of Romanticism: the senses and their place in theEnlightenment projectThe senses and racial science and/or primitivismChemically altering the senses or sensual perceptionOptics, the training and altering of vision in astronomyThe senses and the study of physiologyArtificial stimulation of the sensesLiterary interpretations of any of these issuesTechnologies of soundPhotographyTasteSmellHysteria or neurasthenia and the sensesMiasma